Wifredo Lam

Who is Wifredo Lam?

Wifredo Lam was a Cuban painter whose work fused European modernism with Afro-Cuban spiritual and cultural imagery. Born in Sagua la Grande to a Chinese father and an Afro-Cuban mother of Congolese descent, he grew up steeped in the Santería traditions of his godmother, an experience that would shape his mature painting. He studied art in Havana before moving to Spain in 1923, and after being wounded fighting for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War, relocated to Paris in 1938, where he became close friends with Pablo Picasso and was drawn into the Surrealist circle around André Breton. Fleeing the Nazi occupation of France, Lam returned to Cuba in 1941, and there produced his best-known painting, "La Jungla" (The Jungle, 1943), a large canvas populated with hybrid human, animal, and plant figures drawing on Afro-Cuban religious iconography, now held by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Lam spent much of his later life moving between Cuba, Europe, and the wider Caribbean, and his work is credited with bringing Afro-Caribbean identity into direct dialogue with international modern art. He died in Paris in 1982.

Sources: Museum of Modern Art, "Wifredo Lam: The Jungle" collection notes · Lowery Stokes Sims, Wifredo Lam and the International Avant-Garde, 1923-1982 (2002)